There’s no rhyme or reason / That keeps me playin’ along
Oh, this is kind of along the lines of that last post, but not really: Yesterday, Amritas said, “If Sean can quote from songs, so can I.” He’s right, of course. What was funny was that he was the first to mention it. See, I’m sure this will strike people as weird, but post titles give me the darnedest amounts of trouble. I’m not a journalist, so I often feel as if Sam-the-Eagle-serious headlines are…maybe not misrepresentations, but a bit gussied up for what they’re being used to label. Occasionally, a stray line from a pop song would seem fitting, so I started using one when it came to me.
Then I got into a serious Kylie Minogue jag, and before I knew it, it became like a game: If within 5 seconds, I could think of something from one of her songs that fit the post and would help me recognize it in a list if I needed to edit it later, I went with it. If not, I used something more ordinary. But it was off the cuff. I mean, at some point, I noticed I’d named a good five or six different entries for lines from “Spinning Around,” which is not exactly what you’d normally consider a model of quotability. It gave me a chuckle precisely because it was so random, and I figured few readers would have reason to pick up on it.
Then I noticed that I was getting a decent number of hits from Australia, the UK, Canada, Israel, and other non-US sources. I think most Americans know this by now, but Kylie is a massive celebrity of the Madonna/Janet/Mariah order just about everywhere on Earth except the States. You start using lines from her most inescapable hits, and the chances are not slim that people will recognize them, so I kind of started to expect that sooner or later, I’d open my inbox and be confronted by a message that ran something like
Dear YankeePoofterBitch,
Not a bad blog, but the Kylie lyrics as post titles?
WORST THING EVER.
Cheers, from the Commonwealth,
[name]
This is not to be taken as an offer to change my MO, you understand. Life is too short to be sitting around ruminating over the perfect single-sentence title for a blog entry. I just found it funny that, of the things people comment on in correspondence, that one never came up. In fact, Amritas himself put it in a casual footnote to a post of his own, not anything directed at me. You just never know.